


Exactly the Kind of Person Who Would Do That

by scioscribe



Category: Vice Principals (TV)
Genre: Dysfunctional Relationships, Groundhog Day, M/M, Mental Instability, Repression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 20:28:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8548054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “You’re living the same day over and over again,” Russell said.  “Like Groundhog Day.”
“I actually have not seen that movie.  I intended to, but then Janelle told me it was Ray’s favorite movie, so—”
“But you understand the conceit, Gamby.  You follow the fucking reference.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> Canon-typical levels of terribleness, including sexism and ableism; internalized homophobia, emotional manipulation, suicide, and bleakness. References to school/workplace shootings and murder-suicides. Takes place roughly between "The Foundation of Learning" and "The Good Book."

Russell was wearing the same clothes.

Gamby needed a woman’s opinion on this. He found Amanda Snodgrass coming out of her classroom and buttonholed her: “I need a woman’s opinion on this.”

“Whoa, okay, hold up a little,” she said, adjusting the sleeve of her cardigan.

Cream-colored cardigan, dark blue dress with white polka dots. She was wearing the same thing too. But she was a low-maintenance kind of woman, pretty but free-spirited. She could have done it on purpose. Not Russell, though.

“Official relocation accomplished, Neal, I am in the hallway. What’s up? Is it your daughter?”

“No, but thank you for thinking of her. Lee Russell.”

“Something’s wrong with Mr. Russell?”

“Look at him,” Gamby said, pointing down the length of the hall, where he thought Russell seemed like an apt illustration of everything that was wrong.

“I’m looking. He seems fine. Is he not fine?”

“The khaki slacks and the powder blue jacket with the anchors on it and that cloth thing—”

“Ascot.”

“That ascot. He wore those yesterday.”

“Oh, you saw him yesterday? That’s kind of nice, the two of you hanging out like that.”

“What? Of course I saw him yesterday, don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not being ridiculous,” she said slowly, “and you’re being rude. If you’re in a bad mood, Neal, take it out on somebody else, okay? I didn’t know you and Mr. Russell were friends because you never actually told me that before.”

“I’m sorry.” And again for good measure: “I’m sorry.”

She exhaled and put on her smile again. “Okay, so he’s wearing the same clothes he wore yesterday, what’s the biggie about that?”

“The _biggie_ is that Russell has never worn the same clothes two days the entire time we’ve worked together.”

“That’s an awful lot of you paying attention to Mr. Russell’s clothes.”

“The way he dresses? Everybody pays attention.”

“I don’t think that’s really true,” she said, lips pursed. “But even if it were, you know what it probably is? He probably makes sure to rotate his closet during the week but doesn’t pay attention to it on the weekends, you know, he gets more casual.”

“Well, that would probably be a very good answer if this were Monday, but it’s not, it’s Tuesday—”

“It’s Monday.”

“It’s not—”

“Yep,” she said. “Monday. Coming right straight off of Sunday like always.”

He laughed. “I think I know what day of the week it is. I was here yesterday, same as you were—”

“Well, I wasn’t here yesterday, Neal. No one was, unless maybe you came in by yourself.” She pulled out her phone and lit the screen up for him. “See? Monday.”

“Monday,” he repeated.

She touched his forehead. “Are you feeling okay? Maybe you should go home.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Okay. I haven’t taken a sick day in four years.”

“Then you’re overdue. Go home, drink some orange juice, watch some bad daytime TV, come in tomorrow and see Mr. Russell is some different kind of outfit and everything’s all right with the world.” She patted him on the arm, hand lingering a little longer this time, and then she ducked back into her classroom.

He made his way down the hall in a kind of daze and then heard Brown calling after him, pumps clicking against the floor. “Mr. Gamby, hold up a minute.”

She couldn’t keep pulling him in like this. He stopped anyway, though. “I think I might have to go home sick. I’m having some sort of time slippage thing’s got my head all fucked up.”

“Time slippage?” she said, forehead wrinkled. “What in the hell are you talking about, Gamby?”

“I keep thinking today is yesterday.”

“You running a fever?”

“I don’t know. I’m just standing here talking to you, I haven’t taken my temperature yet or anything. Anyway, if there’s something you need—”

“No, no, you go on home. You sound half-concussed.”

“I wouldn’t feel right just walking away.”

She looked him over for a moment and then nodded. “Seems like Josh Newcomb tried out the industrial-grade stapler over in the woodworking class and stapled—”

“Haley Schiffer’s shirt to the table,” he said. He felt kind of dizzy.

“Now, how’d you know that already?”

“I really think I have to go home now,” he said.

He figured he would just stay up until midnight.

He fell asleep at 11:59.

* * *

 

The next time, he checked his own phone. Monday.

He went to work. He gave out the same two Circles assignments to the same two kids. Russell wore the same clothes. So did Snodgrass. So did he, for that matter. He didn’t know why.

Josh Newcomb stapled Haley Schiffer’s shirt to the woodworking table.

Russell met him out in the woods and said, voice pitched up high, that Gamby had to help him figure out something to get back in Brown’s good graces.

He gave the same suggestions. He looked at Russell’s socks. They were the same socks.

* * *

 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Gamby said.

“You’re living the same day over and over again,” Russell said. “Like _Groundhog Day_.”

“I actually have not seen that movie. I intended to, but then Janelle told me it was Ray’s favorite movie, so—”

“But you understand the _conceit_ , Gamby. You follow the fucking reference.”

“It’s like that, and you don’t have to get shitty. I know what it sounds like.”

“Fucking mental patient, tied-to-the-bed crazy is what it sounds like,” Russell said, but he looked more curious than anything else, not entirely disbelieving. “You know what it is? I bet you’re having an acid flashback.”

“I thought of that.”

Russell smacked him on the chest, grinning. “Hey, look at that, synchronized like a Swiss fucking watch. I got to run anyway, but you hit me up later if the trip gets bad, right?”

“This is your fault,” Gamby called down the hall to him.

Russell shot up V for Victory signs over his shoulders and moved with swagger. If he were going to be repeating the same day over and over again, he at least wished it was one when Russell had worn those tight persimmon pants of his. That was the acid talking. Fuck, he hoped he came out of this trip soon. It hadn’t been fun the first time around.

“Mr. Gamby,” Brown said.

Right: it was that part of the day. “I know, I know,” he said without turning around, “Josh Newcomb tacked Haley Schiffer’s top to the woodworking table with the industrial-grade stapler, I’m on it.”

She maneuvered around him, as easy in the flood of students moving past them as a salmon swimming upstream. “Now, how did you know that? I just came from there. That little pissant Toby Parker came right for me ‘cause he’s scared of you.”

“Fear is a powerful motivator.”

“And you’re not answering my question.”

“Word travels fast,” Gamby said. “When you’ve been on the job as long as I have, you learn to keep your ear to the ground, monitor chatter.” He pointed to the heads moving past them. “Ninety percent of these kids stick earbuds in to walk three minutes from class to class, but they don’t stop talking, so the volume gets upped. You can tune it out or you can learn how to listen to it. There’s been discussion.”

She actually seemed impressed. “Damn, Gamby, that’s a neat trick. See, that’s exactly the kind of skill someone in your position needs to have and so _rarely_ does.”

This was the first time around that she’d complimented him. He’d have to repeat this a couple of times. Unless he was on acid, in which case he’d probably end up on the roof by the end of the day thinking he could fly and he wouldn’t be repeating shit. But he felt lucid. He didn’t even feel drunk.

He said gruffly, “There’s a bench over by the vending machines that sees a lot of traffic. If you wanted, if you weren’t doing anything, we could eat lunch there sometime and I could give you the ears of a veteran disciplinarian.”

“I’d like that,” she said. She smiled at him. “But for now, can you please go smack that boy’s hand in an industrial-grade stapler so he’ll learn not to mess with a lady’s clothes? And call her parents to let her know why she’d going to come home with a ripped midriff like some kind of horror movie girl.”

“That’s a joke about the stapler, right? Because if you ask me, that would be the best thing for him.”

She patted him on the shoulder. “Circles, Mr. Gamby, Circles. Restoration, not retribution.”

“Right,” he said, watching her go.

* * *

 

The next time, he took precautions and took Russell out into the woods first.

“I’m going to tell you something and you’re going to tell me I’m having an acid flashback but I’m _not_ having an acid flashback, Lee, my shit is all fucked up and something seriously _X-Files_ is going on here.”

“Whoa, big boy. Slow down a little.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “And I don’t have time to talk to you again about Brown seeing you spitting in her coffee. I mean, I agree, that’s nothing but bad news, but—”

“Damn, Gamby, it’s not like I’ve been going on and on about it, I mentioned it fucking once.”

“No, you _think_ you’ve mentioned it once, but we’ve had the same conversation three times now, and it would be more if I hadn’t gone home sick for some of those days.”

Russell blinked a couple times. He’d gotten tired enough of looking at Russell’s same outfit over and over again that he’d started watching Russell’s face instead, noticing weird shit like how his eyebrows were a little darker than the hair on his head. “All right,” Russell said. He adjusted Gamby’s collar like that would solve everything. “Unburden yourself, Gamby.”

“I’m living the same day over and over again.”

“Like—”

“Yes, like _Groundhog Day_. See, I knew you were going to say that.”

“Fuck, Gamby, anybody would say that.”

“Fine. It was a bad example. Look, Josh Newcomb is going to staple Haley Schiffer’s top to the woodworking table today. And you’re thinking I sound, what was it you said, ‘fucking mental patient, tied-to-the-bed crazy.’”

Russell’s mouth fell open a little.

“Yeah,” Gamby said. “Last time you got it out a little quicker.”

“Whatever. It’s a fluke. Shit like LSD lives in your spine for half past forever, we’re going to be seventy fucking years old and tripping balls if the right couple of cells collide.”

“Russell. I’m telling you. I’m not having an acid flashback. I’m 100% calm, don’t I seem calm?”

“You never seem calm.” Russell sparked up a cigarette and studied him, like he was noticing Gamby’s eyebrows right back. “So, what, you’re having a little déjà vu? Feeling like you’re giving ISS to the same kids over and over again?”

“I _am_ giving ISS to the same kids over and over again, only it’s not ISS anymore, it’s Circles.”

“Oh, right, Brown’s restorative justice shitshow, like that accomplishes anything. Gamby, you’re just feeling the futility of man.”

“The fuck, Russell? No, I’m not. Look, I walk in, I put the same two kids in Circles, I see you at the end of the hall, Snodgrass is coming out of her classroom, Brown comes and tells me about the thing with the staples. There’s no futility of man. It’s always Monday. I keep trying to stay up till midnight and push it into Tuesday, but it doesn’t get here. I just fall asleep every time.”

“That’s in _Groundhog Day_.”

“Well, I may have to revise my opinion on that movie, it sounds like whoever made it really had his shit together, maybe this happened to him too.” He snapped his fingers. “That must mean I can get out of it.”

“It’s a _movie_ , Gamby!”

“How does the guy in _Groundhog Day_ stop the loop?”

“He learns a lesson or some shit, he falls in love with Andie MacDowell. Look, you said you talked to me the other times, right? We talked about Brown? What did I say?”

He had to go through the whole thing three times, and by then Russell had shut up, was just smoking cigarette after cigarette, not saying they should go back inside, not saying anything. Gamby went through the days one by one.

“So this is five,” Russell said finally. He pitched his cigarette away from him. “This is the fifth time, and each time, nobody but you remembers shit.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying for the last _hour_. Do you believe me? Russell, please say you believe me?”

“I believe you,” Russell said. “I mean, you’re not that imaginative, are you?”

“I’m not, no. I couldn’t imagine my way out of a wet paper bag. I couldn’t even imagine a good way to finish that sentence.”

Russell laughed softly. He looked strange, but they had been out there so much longer than usual: time enough for the light to fall differently on his face.

“So what should I do?”

“I have an idea,” Russell said, “but you’ll have to hear me out on it.”

“Anything. I am up for anything right now. I feel like I’m about to scream my fucking head off.”

“Let me blow you,” Russell said.

He’d say it felt like time stood still if time standing still weren’t the entire problem to begin with. He looked at Lee Russell, who at the moment seemed all eyes and cheekbones and mouth, and something turned over inside him.

“That’s not funny,” he said.

“Do I sound like I’m joking?”

“You—you said serious words in a serious way but I feel like you’re probably joking. I mean, shit, Russell. Neither—neither one of us is—you’re _married_.”

“To a very beautiful woman,” Russell said. “Anyway, that doesn’t concern you.”

“I’m not even gay.”

“Well, who’s anything, these days? You should see the ways these kids describe themselves, everything’s all loaded down with prefixes and suffixes and you need a fucking glossary for it. Hey. A _fucking_ glossary, Gamby, that’s pretty good,” but there was a sheen of sweat on his face. “Somebody could want something, could have spent a long time wanting something, and never knowing for sure what they’d do if they got it. That’s something people don’t understand. That little—that little bit that’s uncontrollable.”

“You sound like you’re going to murder me.”

“I just want,” Russell said, and then he stopped, like that was the end of the sentence, but then he barked out a laugh, harsh and strange. “Never mind, forget it.”

“No, we can. You can.” He didn’t know what made him say it. He hadn’t done anything like this since college, when he’d let some guy not half as pretty as Russell jerk him off. It had felt like a whole _thing_ for a while until he’d met Gale, who hadn’t seemed like a fire-breathing she-beast at the time.

Russell looked at him for a long, draggy kind of moment, like he was about to say he was joking after all, and then without any fanfare he knelt down, Russell on his knees in the dirt and the leaves. The sight went into him like an arrow. Russell looked right below his belt buckle and half-smirked before his lips wobbled too much and he turned away and spat.

“Wait,” Gamby said.

“Just do it already. Just let me do it already.”

“I just want to make sure you understand what you’re doing,” Gamby said. “Because there may be ins and outs of the situation that aren’t entirely clear to you.”

“I don’t think it’s that fucking difficult, Gamby. I mean, I’ve seen porn. _And_ Christine.”

“I’m not talking about the blowjob, Russell. Shit. This whole day-repeating thing is what I mean. Because I’m going to remember this. You—you all down on your knees there—you’re the one who’s gonna forget.” He pointed to himself. “Me, no consequences. You, consequences.”

“What the fuck kind of consequences can there be if the whole universe is stuck in place like a DVD on the fritz?”

“Dammit, Russell! I’m trying to tell you you’re not going to get anything out of this. Obviously you’re in some sort of closet-type, repression-situation—”

“Don’t you stand there hard as fucking tire iron and talk to me about repression, Gamby.”

“—and, and you’re outing yourself. To me. I’ll remember this. You don’t want anyone to know, but I’ll know.”

“No,” Russell said, looking up at him through his eyelashes. He couldn’t remember noticing another man’s eyelashes before. “You know already. I’m the one who can’t know.”

Gamby said, “Okay, well, that seems like—kind of like a sad thing to say.”

“I am down on the ground here messing up a pair of pants cost two hundred dollars for you, now you be a man and put your dick in my mouth already.”

“ _Fine_. I will. I hope you choke on it.”

“Not gonna be enough there to choke me,” Russell said.

“Lee. Shut up.”

Sexual activities of an abbreviated nature occurred and then Russell spat a mouthful of come into the dead leaves and said, “You could have warned me, you know that?” And he did look like someone should have warned him about something. He fell back on the mattress and put his hand over his eyes. It wasn’t the kind of thing Gamby was used to considering, but Russell was still hard.

“You want me to, ah.”

“I am having a whole personal set of issues at the moment and I don’t have time to pick every word out of your mouth, okay? Either ask me or shut the hell up.”

“Fine. I was going to ask you if you wanted me to jerk you off or whatever but now I don’t even want to.”

“Oh.” Russell propped himself up on his elbows. “Fine.”

“Like ‘fine’ as in you want me to do it or like ‘fine’ as in you don’t give a shit that I just said I didn’t want to anymore?”

Russell hesitated, the tip of his tongue slightly parting his lips at the corner. He spoke carefully. “Like ‘fine’ as in it would be good. If you would do that.”

“Okay, then I will. Since we’re partners.”

“Right.”

“Good.” He sat down beside Russell on the mattress and looked at him for a second before Russell closed his eyes. He pressed his hand sort of delicately against the bulge in Russell’s pants and Russell’s eyes flew open again.

“Don’t you make me come in two hundred dollar pants, Gamby.” Russell undid the buttons and zipper. His face was dark red. “Loop or no loop.”

What happened next didn’t take long either, but then he didn’t know what to do next. He hadn’t done anything he had felt this way about before. At least Russell wouldn’t remember it.

Unless he wouldn’t have minded if Russell remembered it.

“How long until the reset?” Russell said.

“Not until midnight.”

“Fuck. You could have mentioned that before.”

“I don’t want to bother you when you’re having a whole thing, but I kind of did mention that before.”

“I can’t stay here with you till midnight, I can’t even look at you.” He sat up and put his head in his hands. “ _Fuck_ , Gamby.”

Gamby patted him on the back and Russell sort of turned towards him.

“We can do something else, if you want,” Gamby said. “Or you don’t have to stay. I mean, you don’t have to be with me for it to work.”

“I don’t know where else I could go.”

“Like your house, or back to the school—”

Russell laughed. He didn’t sound like he was in his right mind. “Home, right. School, right.” He kicked a cigarette butt away from him. “Hey, Gamby. You want to kiss me?”

“I didn’t before, but kind of, now that you mention it, since you’re putting it in my head and everything.”

“Well,” Russell said. He leaned in.

“Wait, Russell, shit. Not when you just had my dick in your mouth. I don’t want to kiss you and taste my own dick. I’ll kiss you next time around.”

“I’m not here next time around, I’m here now, now can you take one for the team already? Are we partners or not?”

He guessed he could keep kissing Russell loop after loop until he’d blotted this one out. If he wanted to do that. And fine, they were partners. He put his hand on the back of Russell’s head and liked that Russell didn’t still have that stupid haircut from when he’d been hanging out with Seychelles. His hair felt soft, sort of silky. Russell leaned in.

Russell didn’t taste like dick, or he didn’t think Russell did. He didn’t really taste like anything except cigarettes. He made soft little non-Russell-like noises into Gamby’s mouth. Next time they would have to do this first and then he would lay Russell down on the mattress and treat him right because he was a fucking gentleman.

They pulled apart, breathing a little hard.

“You sure I’m not going to remember any of this?”

“You never have before.”

“And you didn’t do this before.” He took out a cigarette and fidgeted with it. “Are you going to do it again?”

“Probably. I’d say there’s about an eighty, ninety percent chance. So an eighty-five percent chance on average that I will, yes, do this again. Unless you mean you don’t want me to.”

“What would that have to do with anything?” Russell had finally gotten his hands calmed down and his cigarette lit and was sitting there puffing away, staring out into the woods with no kind of expression on his face. “I wanted to this time, didn’t I?”

“Fuck, Russell, I’m not going to come out here again to make out or have sexual relations with you or whatever without telling you we’ve already done it once.”

“Sexual relations,” Russell said. He scrubbed his hands over his face and then put on the smile Gamby watched him use all day. “So, what else have you done, anyway? You done anything real fucked-up? You put the moves on anyone else?”

“We can talk about this.”

“What’s there to talk about? I want to hear what you’ve been doing! A whole world without consequences and Neal Fucking Gamby unlocks it and you keep coming to work every day?”

“Don’t say that like that, like I don’t have any dreams or whatever. I’m going to get around to doing things, I was just getting my head in order first.”

“All right, superstar, okay. I’m just saying I could think of some things I’d do, I mean some real nasty shit.”

“I would not be surprised by that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Russell said, but he didn’t wait for Gamby to answer. “Hey, you know what you should do?”

“Dammit, Russell, I’ve seen kids on molly that’re calmer than you.”

“You should kill me,” Russell said.

He felt like he could smell Belinda’s curtains burning all over again. “Jesus Christ. I’m not going to kill you, Russell, okay?”

“What, you haven’t done it yet? Motherfucker, that’d be the _first_ thing I’d try. I’d line people up and go bam, bam, bam, and then finish myself off, leave bits of skull on the ground like jack o’lantern pieces after Halloween.”

“Okay, that’s a really specific way to say that, so I kind of feel like you’ve thought about this before, and secondly, dammit, Russell, no. I’m not going killing anybody. I’m especially not killing—anyone I know. Anyone I have a working relationship with. And I sure as hell have a working relationship with _myself_ , so that whole suicide ending, that’s off the table.”

“Don’t be such a pussy. You’d wake up.”

“Would I? Did somebody die and make you the expert on repeating the same day over and over? I must have missed that. Maybe it was going to happen tomorrow, but it didn’t, because we can’t fucking get there!”

“All _right_ , Gamby, _fuck_.” He held up his hands. “ _Waste_ it.”

“And don’t talk about killing a bunch of other people,” Gamby said. “You’re exactly the kind of person who would do that.”

“Motherfucker, _you’re_ exactly kind of person who would do that.”

“Can we go back to getting along, please? You’re the only person I’ve told so far, so right now you’re the only person I can talk to, and I really need you to be here with me and not be all off in your own head daydreaming about fucked-up shit. Okay, Lee? I need you.”

Russell looked at him. Gamby could almost see him turning down the crazy, like mercury dropping in an old thermometer, or a trash can lid going down on a barrel full of snakes. He breathed out. His lips were still a little pinker than normal.

“I thought you had it all together,” Gamby said quietly.

“I’m going to,” Russell said. “I will. Once we get rid of Brown,” but Gamby didn’t know what that would do about Russell with his mouth full of dick and his head full of death, Russell wanting to be kissed. But he’d wanted to see this part of Russell. He’d wanted to know. Friends knew shit about each other and he couldn’t look out for Russell—and maybe the people around Russell—if he didn’t know.

He cleared his throat. “Hey, you should tell me something for next time, so we can skip that whole thing at the beginning.”

“What, tell you something secret so you can convince me that only I could have told it to you? And you can’t think of anything we’ve done in the last hour that’d do the trick?”

“You said you didn’t want to know about any of that. Unless we’re doing it again, in which case I’m still going to tell you, because otherwise it’s a little creepy. And to be honest, I don’t want to dig up you talking about shooting people over and over again.”

“That’s fair, that’s fair, I can accept that.” Russell rolled his head back, clicking his tongue, thinking. “I want a cat.”

“You want a cat?”

“Like as a pet. I want a cat, like I always wanted a Siamese cat, they’re pedigreed.”

“You wanting a cat is what I should tell you to convince you we’ve had this conversation before.”

“Yeah,” Russell said, miffed. “What, that’s not good enough for you?”

“No, it’s fine, it’s just you’re a full-grown man and you could just buy a cat if you wanted one.”

“I’m _going_ to, I just have to get some shit together first.”

“Before you buy a cat? Janelle had a horse, she’s thirteen. You can buy a fucking cat. Okay, okay, hey, no, Russell,” he said, pulling Russell’s sleeve to get him to sit back down again. “Never mind. I’m just running my mouth off. All right, you want a Siamese. Those are those cream-colored ones with the dark faces?”

Russell let himself be won back over and talked for a while about Siamese cats and then, without warning, kissed Gamby again. He sucked on Gamby’s lower lip so hard Gamby thought it would split down the middle. He felt dizzy.

“Don’t tell me,” Russell said. “Don’t tell me next time, Gamby, just fuck me. Tell me about the cat and then fuck me. You promise me you will.”

“Lee—”

Russell put his hand on Gamby’s dick. “I’ll suck you off again if you say yes.”

“Fine, yes, Russell, I’ll keep important secrets from you, and ah—oh. Shit. Okay, yeah. Like that. I did not expect you to just go for it like that.”

“Mm,” Russell said, distractedly.

Gamby closed his eyes.

* * *

 

The next time the alarm went off and it was still Monday, he lay in bed ten minutes longer than was his usual habit, trying to map out what he would do. If he could come up with some sort of ruse to get Russell to a motel or even back to his place before he told him about the cat, they could have something a little better than a bare mattress out in the woods, a bare mattress that smelled like stale Cheetos and weed. So he had to go into work, but first he had to stop somewhere and buy lube, and maybe make a hotel reservation, because he didn’t want to drag Russell all the way to a hotel lobby and then find out the Shriners were in town or some fucking thing and he couldn’t get a room.

So he swung by CVS on his way in to work and got two kinds of lubricant and also a box of chocolates and he made a Priceline booking on his phone while he waited for the world’s slowest cashier to ring him up.

All right, he’d tell Russell he’d figured out something really important, something about Brown, but he had the evidence stashed in a hotel room for safekeeping. That didn’t sound plausible, but Russell was pretty jumpy, so Gamby thought he would go for it.

Then they’d get to the hotel and _blam_ , he’d drop the bit about the Siamese. And then they’d get down to the fucking. He figured if Russell was going to let himself get fucked it was on him to blow Russell this time instead of just jerking him off, and he was good with that. Kind of looking forward to it, actually.

He got to the school.

Russell was wearing different clothes.

Also, Russell’s immediate response to him showing up was to drag him into the janitor’s closet and get all up in his face without kissing him and say, “ _What the actual fuck, Gamby_?”

The CVS bag felt like it was cutting into his fingers all of a sudden. “Is it Tuesday?” Fuck. Was doing Russell the equivalent of falling in love with Andie MacDowell?

“No, it’s not _Tuesday_ , it’s fucking Monday again, and _you said I wouldn’t remember it_.”

“You wouldn’t!”

Russell sputtered and gestured wildly up and down. “Well, I do!”

“You never did before!”

“We never screwed before! You must have given it to me like some kind of fucked-up STD!” He slid down to the floor, his back against the wall, and put his head against his knees. “Oh my God, Gamby, I blew you. _Twice_. I put your dick in my mouth and I liked it. I told you to fuck me.”

It seemed like the wrong time to mention the lube and the hotel arrangements, so instead he just sat down next to Russell. He thought about putting his arm over Russell’s shoulders, but Russell made a kind of viper-like hissing noise when their knees touched, so he figured probably that wasn’t a good idea. He shoved the bag with the lube and the chocolates behind a mop bucket and then thought better of it and fished the chocolates out and offered Russell one. Russell looked at it like it was going to explode.

“It’s just Stover’s,” Gamby said, probably unnecessarily.

“I’m not on the rag, Gamby, _fuck_.” But Russell took one anyway and closed his eyes as the cherry cordial burst on his tongue. “Mm. Give me a different one. Mocha something, if you’ve got it. I never eat this shit.”

“Yeah, you’re pretty slim.” He found a mocha-flavored one and passed it over. “Lithe, maybe, that’s the word I’m looking for.”

Between the two of them, they killed the box of chocolates. Russell ended up with a little streak of hazelnut filling just above his upper lip like somebody’s first try at a mustache and Gamby kissed it off of him. Russell pushed at his shoulders, but not very hard. He stopped, but stopping only made Russell freeze like he was a deer somebody had spotlighted, so Gamby said, “I bought some lube. When I was buying the chocolates. Because I mostly just use lotion to jerk off, so I didn’t have any on hand. I mean, it’s a good thing to have around anyway. But if you wanted to.”

Probably if he took Russell off somewhere and showed him a good time, Russell had a good chance of forgetting that his original plan for all this repeating shit was to spend a couple cycles on murder-suicide.

“And,” Gamby said, feeling like he needed to seal the deal somehow, “we can swing by a pet store or an animal shelter and get you a cat.”

“They don’t have Siamese cats in animal shelters. Nobody gets rid of a Siamese.”

“That can’t possibly be true.”

“I don’t want some discarded cat, like a reject cat,” Russell said. “I want the real thing. Something pretty. A winner.”

“You really have a lot invested in this cat and all that aside, I feel like you’re getting hung up on the wrong thing here. I’ve got a hotel room, too.”

Russell considered that and then stood up. Gamby could still see a little shimmery place above his mouth where he’d kissed the candy off Russell’s lips, and he tried not to focus on that, because if he did he’d never be able to stand up at all.

“You’d better not be planning to fuck me in some shitty Best Western,” Russell said finally.

“Well, I had to walk kind of a fine line, because I don’t really know for sure when we’re going to stop repeating, so I didn’t want to blow my credit limit, but it’s the good Holiday Inn.”

“Like the one on the west side with the gardenias out in front?”

“I was thinking the one on the _north_ side, the one next to the country club.”

“Oh yeah,” Russell said, “that is nice. I mean, not as nice as the gardenia one, but classier than I’d have thought you’d go.”

They took Gamby’s car and rode in silence the whole way. He kept having to avoid thinking about Russell’s ass. Russell had ended up in the persimmon pants this time, like he had known how much Gamby liked them. Check-in was a strained process with Russell all the way the fuck over by the fountain like the mermaid was going to come to life and suck his dick for him if he just looked at her hard enough. Meanwhile, Gamby was convinced the guy at the desk knew exactly what was going on. He had an unfunny little smirk hovering around his mouth. Just as well Russell didn’t see that.

The room was nice. There was a mini-bar.

“I never understand this kind of art,” Gamby said. “It’s like somebody got spaghetti sauce on his hand and then wiped it of on a napkin and they framed the napkin. Janelle painted better than this in second grade. She drew a horse that beat the living shit out of this, I’ll tell you that. That was when she still liked horses.”

“I’m going to get weirded the fuck out if you keep talking about your daughter,” Russell said.

“Sorry, sorry.”

They peeled the quilt off the bed because he’d seen too many eleven o’clock news specials about all the stains they picked up off those things with blacklights. Russell had that deer look to him again. Gamby kissed it off him slowly, minute-by-minute, as he stripped off Russell’s blazer and tie and belt and fruity vest with the peacock-looking buttons.

“I love these pants,” he said. “I always wanted to fuck the shit out of you when you wore these.”

“Oh, bullshit, you never thought about fucking me until I put the idea in your head.”

“I thought about fucking you kind of a lot, actually. I kept having these awkward sex dreams where I was revenge-fucking Gale and then she turned into you. You’re the one who didn’t think about having sex with me until this loop thing started.”

Russell’s Adam’s apple worked up and down and then he said, “After you knocked Jackie right the fuck out.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I’m here, aren’t I?” Russell said, and that did seem like a little bit of an answer, because if Russell just wanted to get fucked or get somebody’s dick in his mouth, he was good-looking enough to go out and get it. He could have been off sucking off Seychelles, but he wasn’t.

Gamby hoped this didn’t make him a homewrecker or anything. There should have been an exceptions clause for time loops. Whatever, he wasn’t Ray, wasn’t anything like Ray. Lee’s marriage was probably busted already anyway, with that bitch-monster mother-in-law of his living there and Lee being, he estimated, roughly eighty percent more into dick than he was into anything else.

So he put his worrying aside and went ahead and fucked Lee, who afterwards lay in kind of a heap of tangled limbs, having come during the middle of it with Gamby’s hand on him, negating the blowjob he’d been meaning to offer. Lee said, “Fucking _damn_ , Gamby.”

“Huh? Oh. Thanks.”

“Is this a smoking room?”

“It’s 2016, Lee, I don’t think they have smoking rooms anywhere anymore.”

“Well, I need a cigarette.” He rolled over onto his side and propped his head up on his hand. “Don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but you were a hell of a lot better at that than I thought you’d be.”

“There’s not a good way to take that.”

“Still.”

“Gale always liked it like that, so we did it a lot.”

“Oh. Why she kept turning into me in your dreams or whatever.”

“She’s hotter than you, too, if we’re saying things one of us shouldn’t take in the wrong way.”

“Who, your ex-wife with the trailer trash streak of color in her hair and the motocross new husband? You’re welcome to her. Not that I shouldn’t send her a gift basket or something for teaching you a thing or two.” A muscle was jumping in his cheek and Gamby wanted to touch it to get it to calm down, but Lee seemed like he’d break if anything so much as grazed him.

“I didn’t mean it,” he said. “About Gale being hotter than you. You’re sexy.”

Lee worried at a torn fingernail with his teeth. “Do you have a gun?”

“In no circumstances am I going to give you a gun.”

“Motherfucker, that’s not what I asked.”

“Fuck, Lee, yes, I have a gun, okay, this is America. I assume you don’t or you wouldn’t be asking me. Or you would have shot that neighbor of yours a long time ago.”

“Christine doesn’t like them.”

“Can we not talk about your wife right now?”

“You’re the one who brought up your ex, Gamby.”

“Fine, whatever. Do what you want. Go shoot yourself in the head or whatever.”

“You really aren’t going to do it?”

“I am really not going to fuck you and then murder you, no.” Then he did touch Lee, delicately, at the hip. “Or, you know, you could stay.”

Russell stayed. They ate out of the mini-bar and ordered room service.

“By now,” Russell said around three in the afternoon, “we’ve probably lost our jobs,” and by nine he said, “And by now Christine’s probably called the police,” but he didn’t seem concerned about it. He didn’t move towards the phone or anything. At eleven fifty-nine, he said, “Maybe it’ll never be Tuesday,” and he sounded happy. Happy enough for Gamby to realize he’d never heard Russell sound happy before.

There was something Gamby wanted to say in response to that, but then he was gone.

* * *

 

Monday again. He braced Russell up against a tree out in the woods and went down on him while Russell moaned and twitched his hips forward and afterwards said, “Your hair is really springy, you know that? You use product on it or is it just like that?”

“Do I seem like the kind of man who uses product on his hair?”

They were stretched out on the mattress and Russell moved so that his head was on Gamby’s shoulder. “There’s nothing wrong with taking good care of yourself, Neal.” He said Gamby’s first name delicately, like he was taking the paper wrapper off one of the Stover’s chocolates. “I use Baxter grooming cream and you’ve been saying all kinds of things about how nice mine feels, so there you go. I mean, you have to special order it, but it does good work.”

“Well, mine just happens like that.”

“I like it,” Russell said. “ _Au naturel_.”

* * *

 

Monday.

He told Russell they were going to a nicer hotel one town over and instead he took Russell to a Siamese breeder and got him a cat. Personally, he could have taken the thing or left it—it kept making this weird yowling sound and kneading its claws into his thigh—but Russell cooed over it like it was his newborn baby. That loop, they didn’t even wait to get to the Holiday Inn: they just pulled off the side of the road and yanked the seats back and Russell rode him with one hand braced against the ceiling and the cat crying in its carrier behind them.

That time, Russell didn’t mention the gun at all. So Gamby couldn’t chalk up the cat as a mistake, even though Russell insisted they go back for it for thirteen loops in a row.

Back at the school, Haley Schiffer’s shirt was probably still stapled to the woodworking table.

* * *

 

“The thing is,” he said to Russell on another Monday, still at the Holiday Inn, that time with the spaghetti sauce “art” turned to the wall because that was how sick of it he was, “my daughter is still mad at me.”

By that time he’d been by to see her a couple times, usually with Russell asleep back at the hotel or watching Korean soaps while he cleaned out the mini-bar. But no matter what he said, or did, for Janelle, not enough time had passed. He still had the bruises from taking the header off the bike and no matter what he did with Lee, or what he felt, or what they said to each other, if he went back to the fucking motocross track, they were still rebuilding that weird little shed that he still didn’t know the point of.

Russell had been trying to teach him Korean: he had a notebook open on his lap with some words written down. The TV threw colors across his face.

Gamby said, “Are you listening to me?”

“Yeah,” Russell said. All his muscles looked slack, suddenly, like his strings had been cut.

* * *

 

Russell named the cat Monday. He kissed its head, right between its ears.

“I love you,” he said, not looking up. He could have been talking to the cat. He could have been talking to Monday. Russell usually managed to mean more than one thing at a time. That night, he almost wore a hole in the hotel room carpet pacing back and forth in front of the clock. At eleven fifty-nine, Gamby saw Russell feel it happen—the wave of sleepiness—and he saw how immensely relieved Russell looked, the way his lips parted, how he looked then just like he did whenever he came.

* * *

 

“We could go to my house,” Gamby said.

Russell said, “I like the hotel,” and of course he did. It wasn’t really anywhere. He wanted to point out that Russell hadn’t killed anybody yet, but of course in the next loop, Gamby went to go try to talk to Janelle again and Russell stole his gun and shot himself in the head in the school parking lot.

* * *

 

“Don’t do that again, Russell, I fucking mean it,” he said, digging his hands so hard into Russell’s hips that he would bruise black-and-blue before midnight, thrusting into him until Russell bit off some kind of choked-sounding noise. “You can’t do shit like that. Promise me.”

“Harder,” Russell said, instead of promising anything.

* * *

 

“I don’t care about the job.”

“I don’t care about the job either.”

“Who’d want to be principal of that shit-heap anyway?” Russell said, flicking his cigarette into the sink. They’d made love in the shower and his skin was still slippery and damp. The hotel smoke alarms still went off when he tried to smoke in the room, but the bathroom’s fans sucked it all up and vented it, so Russell spent a weird amount of time sitting on the edge of the bathtub avoiding looking at himself in the mirror. He had tried to quit about twenty, twenty-five loops back—Gamby had talked him into it—but his body chemistry kept resetting. He couldn’t get far enough away from the craving.

“North Jackson isn’t a shit-heap,” Gamby said.

Russell laughed. “You’re just saying that out of habit.”

But he wasn’t. Actually, he kind of missed work. Missed the school, missed the kids.

_Circles_ , he heard Brown saying in his head. _Restoration_.

In a way, he missed her too.

* * *

 

Then it was eleven-thirty Monday night and he and Russell were screaming at each other, and Russell was saying go, go, fine, Gamby, fuck it, _go_ , just get the fuck _out_ then.

“I didn’t ask for this!” Russell said. “I didn’t tell you to give me fucking—fucking Groundhog Day _herpes_ , you’re the one who did it. You’re the one who dragged me into this, Gamby, damn you. You’re the one, not me. So go stick your dick in _that_ humble pie and _fuck_ it.” He’d dragged his hands through his hair over and over again and the grooming cream had made it stick like that at all angles out from his head. His face was red and he was crying. He wasn’t really hotter than Gale, but Gamby was in love with him anyway, had been in love with him for at least a hundred circles and maybe even longer, maybe even before the whole thing had started.

By then, Russell had killed himself three times.

“Even if it’s Tuesday,” Gamby said, hating that he was crying too, that his eyelashes felt like they were sticking together, “I would still come get you.”

“If it were Tuesday, I’d be fucking married!”

“Lee,” he said quietly, “you’re married _now_.”

Russell stopped. He swallowed a couple times, hard.

Gamby said, “I want to see my daughter grow up.”

He saw Russell consider saying something else— _I love you_ or _Just tell me it’ll work out even when it’s Tuesday_ or _Shut the fuck up and come here_ , even—but then something inside him just seemed to switch off. This was the Russell who had burned Brown’s house down, the Russell who had shot himself in the head not once but three times over, the Russell with the LSD and the broken glass and the brass knuckles crashing into his neighbor’s skull, and for a second, Gamby thought he’d find out what it felt like to die in a loop, because Russell _did_ have the gun—he was almost sure of it—but then nothing happened at all.

Russell smiled his sugary sweet, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth smile, the one he’d used on the school board and on Brown, the one he’d never bothered using on Gamby, the one Gamby hadn’t seen for what felt like years now.

Lee Russell said, “You are the worst thing that ever happened to me,” and then he left.

Eleven fifty-nine. Gamby fell asleep with minibar liquor bottles scattered around him like shotgun shells.

* * *

 

In the morning, he tried calling Russell, but it kept going to voicemail, so in the end, he just went to work.

Russell wore the powder blue jacket, the ascot, and the khaki slacks. He grinned at Gamby from down the hall.

Gamby told Brown about how to pick out the relevant buzzwords from the student chatter and ignore the rest: “After a while, you get used to it, and you’ll do it automatically. My daughter had a book of 3D pictures and at first I could not get that shit to jump out at me, I thought it was broken or something, but then she said to hold it right up next to my nose with my eyes crossed—”

“And then move it back slowly,” Brown said. “I kept buying those for my boys and they’d try to pick things out in them for me, like, ‘look, Momma, there’s a flamingo,’ and I’d nod like I saw it, but I didn’t see shit. And they weren’t helpful, either, I had to get that advice off Google.” She stretched out her legs and lifted her heels out of her shoes. “You know, I figure it’s you being a father, me being a mother—it lends a certain expertise to managing this many children.”

“I think so, too.”

“Mr. Russell doesn’t have any children,” she said.

“No,” Gamby said. “He doesn’t.” He remembered tracing the anchor shapes on that jacket the last time Lee had worn it—teasing him with just that little bit of pressure through his clothes until Lee said he was coming apart at the seams and he hadn’t minded Gamby making him come in two hundred dollar pants _then_ , had he? _You are the worst thing that ever happened to me_. “I don’t know if he can understand.”

That afternoon, Russell met him in the woods, and for one dizzying second, Gamby thought Russell would crack and say that of course he remembered, but he didn’t: he just whined about how Gamby had to help him. Had to put in a good word for him.

“I was flush with victory and now I am on the brink of fucking defeat, Gamby,” he said, flat on his back on the mattress. He covered his face with his hand.

For a second, he thought that _he_ would crack.

_Russell,_ he almost said, _remember, please_.

Then: eleven fifty-nine.

Midnight.

Twelve-oh-one. Tuesday.

When he finally fell asleep, it was two o’clock in the morning. He wanted to dream about Russell, because he felt like that would put some punctuation on things, but instead, he dreamed about Janelle, a Fourth of July when she was eleven, her hand outstretched with a sparkler clutched in her fist.

“Try to stay on the patio,” he’d said. “It hasn’t rained in two weeks and I don’t want you to accidentally burn the entire county to a cinder.”

“Dad! Nothing’s going to burn down.”

“I don’t really think you can guarantee that,” he’d said.

But it changed into a dream about Belinda Brown. They were still sitting on the bench together and she was trying to tell him about Circles again, like he hadn’t been absolutely fucking rocking Circles for weeks. But as he listened, his anger faded away. He said he wanted to be different.

“Sometimes I really admire you,” he said.

“Well! Sometimes I really admire you too, Gamby,” and it didn’t sound like one hundred percent pure bullshit, maybe only thirty percent or so, and somehow it gave him the courage to ask her what he really wanted to know.

“How do you break the circle?”

“I’m not getting you.”

“If someone’s stuck in a circle, if they—if they don’t want to stop and be a new person—”

“Gamby,” she said, eyebrows raised, “it’s called Circles because you sit around in a circle. You went _deep_ with that.”

Then he woke up.

* * *

 

Russell wore navy pants and a dark purple sweater vest on Tuesday and the persimmon pants and the shirt with the pastel buttons on Wednesday. From time to time, Gamby thought he remembered some of it—Russell would look at him just a second too long, or lie on the very edge of the mattress like he was trying to avoid being exactly where they’d been together, or he would start to say something and then stop—but he couldn’t be sure. Russell talked a mile a minute. He said it was really important for them to be careful now, as things came to a close. He said, “We have to stay focused on what’s important,” and when he said that, he didn’t look at Gamby or at anything but the sky.

Gamby checked: his gun was still in its lockbox. For whatever that was worth.

He jerked off thinking about Russell’s mouth and then he bought a box of chocolates and threw them all away without eating any of them.

Janelle visited. He made her pancakes. They rented _Groundhog Day_.  He didn't like it much, but he said he did.

Amanda Snodgrass brushed her knee against his under the lunchroom table.

“Look at you, super-stud,” Russell said. “The kind of player who completely reinvents the fucking game, isn’t that right?” There was no expression in his eyes at all.


End file.
